pycon 2008 - day 1
Posted on March 14, 2008
Filed Under python |
day 1 of pycon 2008 is wrapping up. i’d say it turned out pretty well. aside from wireless issues and some minor registration problems everything seemed to run smoothly and on schedule.
all of the talks i attended were interesting:
- buffer interface in py3k - nice idea - might have some use for this for parsing binary data
- mpi cluster programming with python and amazon ec2 - i’ve done some work with ec2. the mpi/ipython1 spin on it is interesting. the persistence problem is an issue, though.
- applying expert system technology to code reuse with pyke - i see how this might be useful but the barrier to entry seems pretty steep.
- pytriton: building a petabyte storage system - this seems pretty cool. the lack of openness is a bit of a turnoff but nice to know someone had some luck building something like this with python.
- python in system administration: how, when, and why one sysadmin uses python - this was somewhat interesting. i dabble in system administration for my day job. the biggest thing i got out of this was a closer look at paramiko, an ssh library for python which can be useful for system administration.
- tahoe: a robust distributed secure filesystem - this was really interesting. i’ve looked at a few other distributed filesystems without much luck. this one is geared more towards remote backups but appears to be well thought out. it also has a fuse module which is really cool.
- like switching on the light: managing an elastic compute cluster with python - the biggest thing i got from this was a closer look at boto, a library for managing ec2 instances. i’m definitely going to check this out.
the lightning talks were probably the most entertaining, especially those given for the daemonize module and tinypy.
projects that i learned about today which i’d like to check out are:
- elasticwulf - set of scripts for managing a beowulf like cluster on amazon ec2
- ipython1 - distributed reincarnation of the popular ipython command line interpreter
- pyflix - module for efficiently working with the netflix prize dataset
- boto - python module for managing ec2 instances
- zenoss - monitoring package
- paramiko - ssh client/server library in python
- tahoe - distributed filesystem
- daemonize - module for daemonizing processes
- wingware - python ide with interesting remote debugging features
- thrift - lightweight rpc package
- freebase - free database implemented as a huge graph
- argparse - better argument parsing library
- orbited - cool daemon for enabling “comet” applications which communicate asynchronously with a browser
- bazaar - distributed version control system written in python
i’ve heard of a few of these before but learned more about them today which piqued my interest. i think i’ll check out bazaar first.
more tomorrow.
Comments
2 Responses to “pycon 2008 - day 1”
Leave a Reply
photos
-
-
problems with registration?
indeed - you dabble a bit in systems administration… you think some of what you saw could be used for PNM?
what did you take away from looking at zenoss? weren’t logan/luis looking at this? if not, is it worth mentioning to them for their review?
i just had to go through a few extra steps which weren’t clear because of the payment problems you had.
paramiko can probably be used to do some things with pnm. we can already execute commands on all of the machines with pnm but paramiko might help with the initial setup or as a recovery tool if pnm fails.
i didn’t actually hear much about zenoss. they were a sponsor and gave a lightning talk i think. the sysadmin presenter mentioned it but said they use nagios, i think. i’m not sure if they’re mutually exclusive or if they serve different purposes. i think they did look at it but may have concluded that it wasn’t mature enough at the time or something. not sure if they moved forward with anything else in the meantime, though.